Your cock, I said, my hand on it as it gained life.
This is sounder than galvanism, he said. And I wish he had not, for I was distracted then, thinking of Galvani and his electrodes and leaping frogs.
Why have you stopped? asked my husband.
What was his name? Galvani’s nephew? The book you have at home?
Shelley sighed. Yet he is the most patient of men: An Account of the late improvements in Galvanism with a series of curious and interesting experiments performed before the Commissioners of the French National Institute, and Repeated Lately in the Anatomical Theatres of London. To which is added an appendix, containing the author’s experiments conducted on the body of a malefactor executed at Newgate … 1803.
Yes, that one, I said, resuming my vigour, tho’ my ardour had flowed upwards to my brain.
With a fine movement Shelley rolled me onto my back and eased himself inside me; a pleasure I did not discourage.
We have all human life here, he said, to make as we please out of our bodies and our love. What do we want with frogs and vermicelli? With grimacing, twitching corpses and electrical currents?
Did they not say, in the book, that his eyes opened? The criminal?
My husband closed his eyes. Tensing himself, he shot into me half-worlds of his to meet half-worlds of mine, and I turned my head to look out of the window where the moon was hanging like a lamp in a brief and clear sky.
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Sonnet 54, said Shelley.
Sonnet 53, I said.
He was spent. We lay looking out of the window together at the scudding clouds that speeded the moon.
And you in every blessed shape we know.
The lover’s body imprinted on the world. The world imprinted on the lover’s body.
On the other side of the wall the sound of Lord Byron spearing Claire Clairmont.
Such a night of moon and stars. The rain had starved us of these sights and now they seemed more wonderful. The light fell on Shelley’s face. How pale he is!
I said to him, Do you believe in ghosts? Truly?
I do, he said, for how can it be that the body is master of the spirit? Our courage, our heroism, yes, even our hatreds, all that we do that shapes the world – is that the body or the spirit? It is the spirit.
I considered this and replied, If a human being ever succeeded in reanimating a body, by galvanism or some method yet undiscovered, would the spirit return?
I do not believe so, said Shelley. The body fails and falls. But the body is not the truth of what we are. The spirit will not return to a ruined house.
How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body?
Is it my body that you love?
And how can I say to him that I sit watching him while he sleeps, while his mind is quiet and his lips silent, and that I kiss him for the body I love?
I cannot divide you, I said.
He wrapped his long arms around me and rocked me in our damp bed. He said, I would, if I could, when my body fails, cast my mind into a rock or a stream or a cloud. My mind is immortal – I feel it to be.
Your poems, I said. They are immortal.
Perhaps, he said. But something more. How can I die? It is impossible. Yet I shall die.
How warm he is in my arms. How far from death.
Did you think of a story yet? he said.
I said, Nothing comes when bidden and I lack the power of imagination.
The dead or the undead? he said. A ghost or a vampyre; what will you choose?
What would frighten you most of all?
He pondered this for a moment, turning on his elbow to face me, his face so close I could breathe him in. He said, A ghost, however awful or ghastly its appearance, however dreadful its utterances, would awe me but would not terrify me, for it has been alive once, as I have, and passed into spirit, as I will, and its material substance is no more. But a vampyre is a filthy thing, a thing that feeds its decayed body on the vital bodies of others. Its flesh is colder than death, and it has no pity, only appetite.
The Undead, then, I said, and, as I lay with my eyes open wide with thinking, he fell asleep.
Our first child died when he was born. Cold and tiny I held him in my arms. Soon after I dreamed that he was not dead, and that we rubbed him with brandy and set him by the fire and he returned to life.
It was his little body I wanted to touch. I would have given him my own blood to restore his life; he had been of my blood, a feeding vampyre, for nine dark months in his hiding place. The Dead. The Undead. Oh, I am used to death and I hate it.
I got up, too restless to sleep, and, covering my husband, wrapped a shawl round me and stood at the window, looking out over the dark shadows of the hills and the glittering lake.
Perhaps it would be fine tomorrow.
My father sent me away for a time to live in Dundee with a cousin, whose company, he hoped, would improve my solitude. But there is something of a lighthousekeeper in me, and I am not afraid of solitude, nor of nature in her wildness.
I found in those days that my happiest times were outside and alone, inventing stories of every kind, and as far from my real circumstances as possible. I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.
I was never bored except in the company of others.
And at home, my father, who had little interest in what was fit or otherwise for a young, motherless girl, allowed me to sit unseen and silent while he entertained his friends, and they spoke of politics, of justice, and more than that too.
The poet Coleridge was a regular visitor to our house. One evening he read out loud his new poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It begins – how well I recall it –
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
I crouched behind the sofa, a mere girl, enthralled to hear the tale told to the wedding guest and to picture in my mind the awful journey at sea.
The Mariner is under a curse for killing the friendly bird, the albatross, that followed the ship in better days.
In a scene most terrible, the ship, with its tattered sails and battered decks, is crewed by its own dead, reanimated in fearful force, unhallowed and dismembered, as the vessel drives forth to the land of ice and snow.
He has violated life, I thought, then and now. But what is life? The body killed? The mind destroyed? The ruin of Nature? Death is natural. Decay inevitable. There is no new life without death. There can be no death unless there is life.
The Dead. The Undead.
The moon was clouded over now. Rain clouds rapidly returned to the clear sky.
If a corpse returned to life, would it be alive?
If the doors of the charnel house opened and we dead awakened … then …
My thoughts are fevered. I hardly know my mind tonight.
There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.
What